Monday, July 28, 2014

Reckoning the impact of social values on spatial conservation priorities

Here is a good paper on coming to terms with impact
of social values on spatial conservation priorities. Impact of social values
has a very important place, in the scheme of things, while devising conservation
strategies. The scientists used conservation planning software Zonation to
arrive at some interesting conclusions.
Conservation planners will find the paper very useful.

Integrating Biological and Social Values When
Prioritizing Places for Biodiversity Conservation

The
cascading impact of social values on spatial conservation priorities has
received little attention from scientists and is poorly understood. Here the
scientists present an approach that incorporates quantitative data on social
values for conservation and social preferences for development into spatial
conservation planning. They undertook a peoples’ participation GIS survey to
spatially represent social values and development preferences and used species
distribution models for 7 threatened fauna species to represent biological
values. These spatially explicit data were incorporated in the conservation
planning software Zonation to examine how conservation priorities changed with
the inclusion of social data. Integrating spatially explicit information about
social values and development preferences with biological data produced
prioritizations that differed spatially from the solution based on only
biological data. However, the integrated solutions protected a similar
proportion of the species’ distributions, indicating the fact that Zonation
effectively combined the biological and social data to produce socially
feasible conservation solutions of approximately equivalent biological value.
The scientists were able to identify areas of the landscape where synergies and
conflicts between different value sets are likely to occur. They emphasize that
Identification of these synergies and conflicts will allow decision makers to
devise communication strategies to specific areas and in turn ensure effective
community engagement and positive conservation outcomes.